Why does Aladdin blow Mulan out of the water?

Today, Disney is without a doubt the world's most prolific entertainment company. From ancient China to the MCU to a galaxy far, far away, the company funds and publishes some of the world's most recognizable movie entertainment properties, and it makes a ridiculous amount of money doing so. Current subscribers to Disney+ can find plenty of content, while the game world was recently intrigued by a slate of announcements which essentially boil down to Disney making its way into the AAA video game business (with games based on Avatar, Indy, and Star Wars, the company is poised to have its hands in a ton of new releases over the next few years). Let's give Disney its due, plenty of its recent properties have been extremely well received. Recently, WandaVision and The Mandalorian have brought a certain amount of top-tier respectability to the company's still young streaming service. But not everything has been so popular. Here I'm thinking of Disney's live action remakes of classic fairy tale movies, which have been reliable only in that their quality has been unreliable. 

The most recent of these films is Mulan, which is somewhat difficult to assess comparatively for obvious reasons. It released to mixed reviews at best, but so did Aladdin, which I loved, and The Lion King, which I didn't mind. And I remember the animated version being one of my favorite films as a kid. So when I finally got around to watching Disney's latest remake on Disney+, I didn't expect to genuinely struggle to make it all the way to the end. This movie is dripping in sterility and lacks all of the emotional resonance and captivating plot of its animated predecessor. I can't imagine watching it again, and I wouldn't recommend anyone watch it in the future. It doesn't help that Disney worked with a government actively committing genocide to produce this film, but I feel enough has been written on that subject. 

Don't get me wrong, the animated film was flawed. At times leaning heavily on stereotypes, there was a lot that could have been done to clean up the film for modern audiences. Which brings me to the Aladdin comparison. Similarly relying on stereotypes, as well as a largely white voice-over cast and some overly-caricatured characters, the original movie needed some work. Disney gave it that in spades, releasing a live-action movie with beautiful visuals, a brilliant and believable cast, and a variety of songs that I'll happily listen to while I'm just driving in my car (the numbers by Will Smith particularly). That movie pleasantly surprised me with just about every choice it made, and while I think it had a weak spot in Jaffar, I'll happily rewatch that movie anytime my girlfriend or I wants to watch something a little more lighthearted and fun than our normal fare. 

Mulan could have been the same, so what happened? For one, the new Mulan doesn't feature a single character-sung song. This is a devastating omission, and coupled with the fact that the soundtrack it does have is unmemorable at best, it seriously decreases the movie's watchability. A good soundtrack can improve anything, and a good musical can warm even the coldest hearts. Mulan has neither. Some of the dialogue in this movie evokes the previous film's musical pieces, and it broke my heart to hear them spoken normally, because the thing that I remember enjoying the most about the animated Mulan was its musical score. 

While beautiful at times, the new movie suffers from clunky acting and clunkier CGI, and the changes made to the plot don't seem to improve the movie much, if at all. The new witch character could have been interesting but ends up coming off as kind of a useless addition that I couldn't bring myself to care for, while the invaders don't seem nearly as menacing as they did in the animated version of the movie. The plot feels even more poorly paced than the animated movies, with scenes that don't seem necessary while sometimes it feels as though we've skipped over vital information, or conveyed it in just a simple line of dialogue. This all comes together to make the entire film feel kind of off-track and uninteresting in a fatal way. I read somewhere that Disney wanted Mulan to be a more realistic take on the fairy tale, and that just seems ridiculous to me. Who wants that? 

I genuinely admire the fact that Disney tried to take a popular animated film and update it for modern American and Chinese audiences, while also trying to inject an overall message that leaned much harder on gender roles than the original film. But unfortunately the whole movie comes across poorly, and while it's possible that I have some sort of distorted nostalgic memory of an animated favorite when I was a kid, the same was true with Aladdin, and I unironically think that movie is a Disney masterpiece. So maybe Mulan is just bad. Still, at least I'll probably remember it, which is more than I can say for most of the Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Dumbo. In the future, hopefully Disney leans a little harder into the musical aspect of these movies, and a little less into the absurd realistic vision they seem to have. These are fairy tales. Disney should embrace that.